Many liberals respect Richard Posner -- distinguished judge, famed University of Chicago legal scholar, theoretician of the post-September 11 homeland-security state -- for his analytical prowess on a broad range of topics. But when Posner took to the pages of Sunday's New York Times Book Review to examine the media's political biases, he revealed that even "distinguished" conservative intellectuals can fall for the most absurd partisan myths.
In a rambling, lengthy (by the Book Review's standards, though not by the scholarly journals he should stick to writing for) cover story, Posner trotted out the much-beloved conservative bogeyman of the "liberally biased media" while gently chastising the right for glossing over the reality of corporate ownership. Anyone with even a passing understanding of the state of American media -- or journalism -- should recognize that his assessment is merely partisan propaganda masquerading as "independent" analysis.
Posner's writing, peppered with questionable generalizations, basic inaccuracies, and trite philosophizing on the nature of technology, is so incoherent (blame the Times' socialist editors) that it's a challenge to simply tease out his actual argument. As far as I can tell, it's something like this: The media are "more liberal then they used to be" because blogs, the Internet, and the "new media" are "pushing the already liberal media farther left." His justification that the media are "already liberal" is based on adding some numbers together and reporting that "of all journalists who consider themselves either liberal or conservative, 76 percent consider themselves liberal, compared with only 35 percent of the public that has a stated political position."
This is an overstatement even by the standards of most conservatives. (Studies cited by the right-wing Media Research Center, for example, find between 25 percent and 61 percent of the media to be liberal.) But polling that divides journalists' political opinions into narrow ideological categories is flawed to begin with. Most journalists shy away from the simplistic and meaningless categories of "liberal" and "conservative"; when given the option in a poll by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a majority identified themselves as centrist. Furthermore, the minority that did report having a partisan political orientation only held such views on specific issues.
Though more of these (relatively few) opinionated reporters lean left on social questions, they also stand significantly to the right of most Americans on economic policy. Posner casually drops statistics -- attributed to Jim Kuypers, a scholar favored by conservative organizations dedicated to perpetuating the myth of media bias -- without investigating how accurately they portray reality, which is usually complex enough to defy simplistic binary categorization. This is exceptionally poor form for a scholar acclaimed as a pioneer of using quantitative analysis in social science.
It's also unclear that blogs affect the mainstream media as substantially as Posner believes. A minority of Internet users actually read them, and the Pew Internet & American Life Project recently reported that most don't even recognize the word, indicating their limited impact on society -- and the media -- as a whole. Additionally, many of the stories receiving extensive coverage in the left half of the blogosphere -- from allegations of voter fraud in Ohio to the Jeff Gannon scandal to the "Downing Street Memo" -- were hardly reported by the mainstream media. Indeed, when blogs appear in conventional media, they're mostly discussed as a trendy phenomenon; the innovative content they produce receives far less attention.
Then there's the argument that the rise of conservative media outlets like FOX News have "caused CNN to shift to the left" because "CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to FOX anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences." In fact, the reverse is true. In 2001, with FOX stealing its audience, then-CNN chief Walter Isaacson consulted with Republican politicians to discuss how his network could "improve its image" among their followers. Unsurprisingly, the network leaned unabashedly pro-administration for most of the Iraq War, prompting CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, to declare that reporters were "intimidated" by the Bush administration into limiting themselves to softball questions about the war's dubious justification. Instead of becoming more liberal, CNN and other nonpartisan networks shifted rightward under outside pressure, hosting more conservative guests than liberal ones.
The shift at the network continues in other, subtler ways: showcasing Bill Schneider and Dinesh D'Souza as independent news "analysts" despite their ties to conservative think tanks; allowing Jack Cafferty, noted for his racist remarks toward Arab Americans, to anchor its In the Money program without any balancing viewpoint; and using Jack Valenti, conservative by most estimates, to represent the "Democratic" point of view on the "Strategy Session" segment of Inside Politics. When combat in Iraq began in 2003, pro-war sources outnumbered anti-war ones six to one on such "nonpartisan" news shows as CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, ABC's World News Tonight and PBS' NewsHour -- the third often derided as a "liberal" show on a "liberal" network by conservative wolf-criers.
But what's most disturbing about Posner's critique isn't his suspect analysis of media bias; it's his underlying belief that the politically loaded media is just reacting to the public's demand for "entertainment, confirmation, reinforcement, emotional satisfaction" from the news market. Here's where Posner diverges most acutely from reality. If that's what Americans wanted, then they'd be happy with the current state of the media. But by Posner's own admission, they aren't. That indicates that Americans don't want more partisanship from the networks, but instead a genuinely free press that prioritizes the facts over sensationalism and profit.
Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an intern at The American Prospect and a junior at Princeton. He is the editor of the Princeton Progressive Review and writes regularly for CampusProgress.org. This article was edited to include additional statistics cited by the Media Research Center.
